“Good morning, everyone,” says Griffin. “Unfortunately, your classmate Lily O’Callaghan has been missing since Sunday night. While we won’t go into the details here, her family are all very worried, and we would very much like anyone who knows Lily well or who spoke to her at school last week to please step forward with any information you have. I cannot express enough how even the smallest conversation could be helpful to us.”
You can literally hear the sound of a roomful of girls catching their breath at once. An inward suck of tension, of air being pulled through teeth.
Griffin’s eyes flick over the room. I can see her mentally logging this. Something to write in her notebook later. Her stare hops from girl to girl. She’s figuring out who she’s going to pull aside if no one puts their hand up.
The Garda Niamh fancies starts to talk. “Now, I don’t want any of you to panic,” he says, his voice kind. “In the vast majority of cases, girls of Lily’s age and description tend to have run away from home. Usually they come back on their own. But we want to make sure that Lily is safe, so if anyone knows about a boyfriend, or a friend – or an … organization – that Lily might have been a part of.”
Detective Griffin suddenly looks at her subordinate sharply, as if the word “organization” was not part of their agreed script.
More girls glance over their shoulder. A few nudge each other and look at me. If I don’t say something now, I’m going to be outed. Griffin is going to triangulate these stolen glances and realize that I am at the centre of them. I put my hand in the air.
Miss Harris’s eyes widen. She’s only been here a couple of years. I don’t think she actually knows that Lily and I used to be best friends.
“Maeve?”
“Hi,” I say slowly. “I think I might know something about Lily.”
All three adults blink at me and then look at each other in an expression of “huh, we didn’t think it would be that easy.”
“I think it might be my fault,” I say.
And I am led from the room, the heat of their stares molten as a dragon’s breath. Thankfully, I’m in the hallway before the tears start.
I’m led into Sister Assumpta’s office, a bright airy room where they bring rich parents and ex-alumni when they’re looking for donations to fix the roof. I’ve never been in this room before, though of course I see snatches of the lemon walls and the over-stuffed couch whenever I pass it, usually to get told off in Miss Harris’s pokier office.
Now I’m in here and I don’t know what to do with myself. No one has a directive, either. Stand up? Sit down? If I were being punished my natural instinct would be to stay standing, but the air around me is so tense with concern and gratitude that my knees feel weak. My bones have been replaced by a stack of almost-empty shampoo bottles, ready to be kicked over in the shower.
“Now, Maeve,” Miss Harris says, touching my arm as she sits down on the couch. “Why don’t you sit down next to me, grab a tissue, and just breathe for a second.”
I flop down, still streaming tears. Jesus Christ. What must she think of me? Through my tears, I can see a slight furrow emerging on her forehead. She’s confused by this. She probably has a list in her office of sensitive girls and I very much doubt my name is on it.
I take a tissue all the same, huffing the contents of my nose into it. I grab another. And another. From the corner of my eye, I see Sister Assumpta in all her ancient glory hobbling into view.
There’s a joke about Sister Assumpta that they keep her in this office with the phone unplugged because it’s cheaper than sending her to a retirement home. It’s not exactly a nice joke, but it started long before I was at St Bernadette’s and it will continue until Sister Assumpta dies. Which, it seems, she has no plans on doing. Just as every human civilization thinks that it will be the one to witness the Apocalypse, every wave of girls that comes through this school is convinced they are going to be the one to witness Assumpta’s passing.
Sister Assumpta is a tiny woman. She is somewhere between sixty-five and a hundred and three years old, depending on the weather. In winter she seems like the oldest person to ever have lived, clad in layers of knitwear and thermal socks that she straps to her hands.
During our first month of secondary school, Lily and I were hanging around in an empty classroom during lunch. Sister Assumpta suddenly flung open the door with a vigour I haven’t seen in the old woman before or since. She pointed a bent finger at the two of us.
“You two,” she said. “Come with me.”
We were so new to St Bernadette’s that we weren’t sure whether we had broken some rule without knowing it. We also still thought that Sister Assumpta had power, which she doesn’t.
We followed her outside, to where her 1963 sky-blue Volkswagen Bug was parked under a tree.
“She still drives?” Lily asked in a whisper.
I stifled a giggle. “How is that legal?”
As she unlocked the car, we got a chance to gaze at the inside, and quickly realized that this beautiful little Bug hadn’t been driven in some time. The window had been left slightly unrolled, and the car had filled up with piles of fallen leaves, some the dark orange of old pumpkins, some as green as a traffic light. The car clearly hadn’t left the school car park in years.
Sister Assumpta popped open the boot and pointed to three decaying cardboard boxes festering inside. “Carry these in,” she said shortly. “Lift from the legs. You’re good strong girls, now. That’s it.”
We followed her back to the school and dumped the boxes in what would become Miss Harris’s office but then was just a big closet. As soon as Sister’s back was turned, I opened a box and picked out a velvet jewellery case. There were about twelve cases, maybe more. I clicked open one and found endless strings of costume jewellery. Plastic pearls, glass diamonds. Stuff that probably wasn’t worth much individually, but together, probably came to a few hundred euro.
We talked about it for months. The VW Bug filled with leaves, the masses of cheap jewellery, the crooked finger. The feeling that we were just one small part of some vast plan our school principal had, and perhaps was still completing. We wrote stories about it. Lily would start with two sentences, then fold the paper down, then I would write two sentences. Before long we had an ongoing saga, an epic romance about an ex-nun and a Brazilian count. Every time we saw Sister Assumpta after that, we would explode into giggles, and we never told anyone why.
Seeing Sister Assumpta now, this tiny deranged little ex-nun with her sock hands and her ankle-length navy skirt, everything starts to dawn on me.
Lily is gone. An entire life of memories, private jokes and pet names are up in smoke, and I’m the one to blame. Did the tarot reading on Friday really upset her so much that she couldn’t face coming to school on Monday? Did she run away?
I start howling again. Crying, it turns out, is very hard to stop once you start. Sister Assumpta is peering at me through her enormous owl glasses, utterly mystified.
“This is a private office,” Sister A says, clearly annoyed. “I didn’t say you could have police in here.”
“I know, Sister,” says Miss Harris. “But these are rather special circumstances, so I didn’t think you would mind.”
“There’s a girl crying in here,” says Sister A. “Why is there a girl crying in here?”
“This is about Lily O’Callaghan, Sister,” replies Miss Harris, trying to keep her cool. “The missing girl.”
“Who?”
“Look,” Detective Griffin says finally. “We really can’t take a statement from Maeve unless she has a parent or guardian present, and she’s clearly very upset. How about we spin her home, we can talk to her parents, and Maeve can speak to us there? Where she’s comfortable?”
“Isn’t that Harriet Evans’ little sister? The youngest one?” Sister Assumpta pipes up again.
“No, Sister,” Miss Harris replies, exasperated. She turns to Griffin. “I think that would be a good idea.”
So t
hat’s what we do. Everyone’s on morning break, crossing the yard to access the car park behind the building. There are girls in my year artfully lounging against walls and mossy, mildewed benches. They straighten up as they see me being dog-walked by two Gardaí, standing on tiptoes to watch me leave.
A breathtaking silence falls over the yard. Everything seems to slow down and mute itself. Even the skipping rope that some of the younger girls are swinging becomes soundless.
Then, I hear it. A lone voice calling like a shotgun across a desert plain.
“Witch!”
Griffin’s head cocks.
“WITCH!”
Griffin gazes around at the yard, trying to locate the source of the sound. It’s too late though. There are too many of them.
“WITCH! WITCH! WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!”
And it keeps going until we get into the squad car, and leave St Bernadette’s.
CHAPTER TEN
WE’RE A MILE AWAY FROM THE HOUSE WHEN I REMEMBER that Mum and Dad are in Portugal, and I have no idea whether Jo has classes today. I unlock the front door and Tutu jumps on everyone. Usually I wouldn’t feel the need to apologize about the dog. But now, within the rigid formality of having two Gardaí in my house, everything feels like proof of my obvious guilt. The jumping dog, the dirty plates in the kitchen, the gnarled brick of butter still left out on the table from breakfast. Everything around me feels like evidence of what a scruffy, scrubby little urchin I am. A bad housekeeper, and a bad friend.
“Jo!” I shout up the stairs, hoping she’s home. No response. I smile at Griffin and Ward apologetically.
“Joannnnnnne!” I shout again, charging up the stairs.
“What?” She opens her bedroom door crankily, dressed in joggers and towelling her wet hair. Oh, thank God she’s home.
“There’s … uh. There’s police here.”
“Excuse me?”
“Downstairs. I have to give a statement. Lily is missing.”
“Lily O’Callaghan?” Joanne claps her hand to her mouth, her eyes already moist. “For how long?”
“Sunday night. Look, just come downstairs, will you?”
Joanne comes down and I shakily make introductions. Detective Griffin gives a modified version of what she told the class. She gives Jo more detail, though, more relaxed without the eyes of twenty teenage girls boring into her.
“The last Lily’s parents saw of her was on Sunday night. She went to bed at around ten, but according to her brother it wasn’t unusual for Lily to stay up drawing or reading until one or two in the morning.”
Her brother.
“The O’Callaghans say they didn’t notice any particular changes in her behaviour that weekend, although maybe a little more quiet than usual, on reflection.”
“Lily was always quiet,” Jo says. “She’s just like that.”
“That’s the impression we’re getting. In any case, her mother didn’t realize she was missing until around 8 a.m. on Monday morning, when Lily didn’t respond to numerous calls. Eventually Mrs O’Callaghan opened the bedroom door, and she was gone. She didn’t take anything with her. No clothes, no bag. She didn’t even change out of her pyjamas, by the looks of things.”
Jo and I are silent, both of us imagining Lily trudging down her suburban road in pyjamas. I find myself wondering, strangely, what kind of pyjamas Lily wears now.
“We’re looking for anyone who can give us information about Lily,” Griffin concludes. “And Maeve volunteered herself.”
“But, Maeve, Lily hasn’t been round here in ages. You two fell out last year, didn’t you?”
Griffin gives me that look again. That sharp, enquiring look that says, Well that’s interesting.
“Yes, but … we spoke again on Friday. I gave her a tarot reading. I didn’t want to, and neither did she, but the girls in school sort of … made it happen.”
“I’m sorry, tarot reading? Like, the cards?” Ward asks.
“Yeah,” I reply. “I’ve been giving tarot readings for everyone in our year. I found a deck in school and I learned the card meanings. It wasn’t a big deal. Or, I didn’t think it was. Anyway, I gave Lily a reading and she got upset. Then she didn’t come back to school.”
“What did you tell her in the reading? Did you say she was going to die, or something?”
“No, not at all. I would never. The cards don’t predict the future, they show your present.” I don’t know why I’m delivering my little rehearsed speech on tarot readings to a detective. As if she cares.
“What did Lily’s reading say?”
“It said she was very lonely. And heartbroken.”
“Lonely? For a boyfriend? Did she have an ex-boyfriend she was in contact with?”
“No.” I shake my head firmly. “Lily wasn’t like that. The reading was about me. I…”
I splutter again. Jo asks if I want some water, and I shake my head. I take another run at the sentence.
“I used to be Lily’s best friend. And then we stopped – I stopped – being friends with her.”
“Did you have a fight?”
I bury my face in my hands. No, we didn’t have a proper fight. I wish we had. A fight presumes that both parties are equally at fault.
The truth of the thing is that I froze Lily out, plain and simple. I started getting friendlier with some girls who were technically higher up the social pecking order, and, for a while, I thought Lily could climb with me. Me, Michelle, Niamh, and Lily would all sit around at lunch. I knew the girls didn’t like Lily as much as I did, but I thought that could change once they got to know her. They would see how funny she was, how utterly original.
But it didn’t work out like that.
“What are you staring at, Lily?” Niamh asked one day when she caught Lily staring at them taking selfies together. “You’re always looking at us.”
“I was just thinking, how cool would it be if you took all these selfies, and they aged and got all disgusting, but you stayed the same? And every time you opened your phone, you just saw this gnarled tree-stump face. Like in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But with phones.”
I laughed at that. I hadn’t read The Picture of Dorian Gray, but Lily had, and she had told me the plot. We acted it out. We were still into “acting things out”, even though we were definitely too old for games like that.
“You’re weird,” Niamh retorted. At first, she said it warmly, as if giving her the benefit of the doubt. But she kept saying it. The last straw came when we started hanging out with some boys from St Anthony’s at the old tennis courts after school, and Lily licked Keith Delaney.
“Maeve,” Niamh rang me that night. “We need to talk. It’s about Lily.”
“About the licking,” I countered, knowing already what this was about. “She was just doing this game we play sometimes.”
The Licking Game was a thing we had invented a few years earlier. It started when Roe told us that it was impossible to lick your own elbow, and we spent about two days trying. That spun into a years-long game of trying to lick things in difficult or risky places, even if it was just putting your tongue on it for a second. We would go into Waterstones on a Saturday and pretend to browse from across the store, keeping one eye on each other, and then slowly – so, so, slowly – put our tongue on whatever book we were pretending to read. Then we would leave the shop, holding each other and screaming with laughter.
It’s one of those “you had to be there” things, I suppose.
So when Lily, after hours and hours of patiently waiting for something fun to happen at the tennis courts, gently tapped her tongue on the back of Keith’s neck, it was her way of saying: Hey, can we just have some fun, already?
When I lamely tried to explain Licking to Niamh, she was silent for a time. “Look, Maeve,” she said, “we never asked to be friends with her, and we don’t want to hang around with her any more.”
And that was it. I started snubbing Lily at school, turning my back on her, refusing to meet her eye whe
n she spoke to me. I told Joanne to tell her I was out when she phoned the house looking for me. Eventually, Lily got the hint. The Licking of Keith Delaney turned out to be her final act as my best friend.
I turn my face back to Griffin. “No, we didn’t have a fight. We just grew apart.”
“Can you put a date on that, Maeve? When you stopped being friends.”
“Just … just before the Christmas holidays. Last Christmas. So, around fourteen months ago, I suppose.”
Ward looks irritated. He is writing everything down. “So, Maeve, are you saying that you have no relevant information about Lily from the last year? Did she have any … any chat rooms she visited? Any special friends?”
Griffin cocks an eyebrow at him. “I’m not sure if ‘chat rooms’ are quite the thing any more, Ward. And anyway, this is relevant. Tell me more about this tarot reading, Maeve. Is there anything else that happened?”
I bite my lip. “Yes. A card came up. One that didn’t belong to the rest of the pack.”
“Can you show me? Do you have your cards now?”
I dig them out of my school bag, sitting on the floor next to me. I flip them over so they’re face up.
“See, all these cards, they each have a place. They belong to a suit or a pattern. But this one card, it came up only for Lily. It was this scary-looking woman called the Housekeeper. She was all on her own.”
“What does the Housekeeper mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s why Lily got freaked out. She believes in this stuff. More than most people. More than me. When I told her I didn’t know the card, she got scared. I was scared, too, because I thought I had taken the Housekeeper out of the deck.”
“Can you show me the Housekeeper now?”
“That’s the thing,” I say, biting my lip. “I don’t know where it’s gone.”
There’s a quaver in my voice, as if I’m afraid the card is going to walk through the door.
“So you were frightened, and that made Lily frightened,” Griffin says. “Her brother mentioned that she was quite susceptible to that kind of thing.”
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 6